A/N: Not so much action this chapter, I've tried for some dramatic dialogue.
Thanks for the reviews I've gotten so far. If you haven't reviewed and like this story then please review. The story is almost finished. I would like to do a few timeskips (Chuunin exam or the current Naruto setting) but only if the characters were popular enough to continue. I have my ongoing story and a lot more ideas, but I like these characters too and would like to keep writing them.
Chapter 04 – Unnecessary Motions
A ninja needs to think beyond the normal.
Kayaku watched Jiraiya fall into Shinobu's trap after he managed to pull himself out of the ground, leaving his clothes stained with dirt. He walked slowly toward the others, not really hiding, but keeping out of the way. He realized that his new teacher could tie him to the log anytime he wanted, so what was the point of it all?
He clutched the kunai that had earlier fallen very close to his head, yet careful not to crush the bugs that were still holding onto it. He had the youthful fascination with bugs that many boys his age had, and therefore the bug-covered kunai was curious item. He hadn't seen bugs like these before.
However, Jiraiya's situation drew away his attention.
An unexpected feeling of satisfaction and jealously filled him as the snare pulled Jiraiya into the air. However, by the time Jiraiya used the replacement to escape and quickly recreated Shinobu's snare, he realized one thing. Jiraiya could not be defeated, not as they were. Their teacher was merely playing with them, he had a hundred different ways to counterattack or dodge each of their attacks, but only responded by the most basic move.
The only challenge for Jiraiya was choosing the correct move to avoid hurting his new students.
While watching them from the distance, he noticed movement in the trees nearby them. It was Chouichi. The large boy was climbing up a tall tree the old fashion way, without attaching himself through chakra. The others hadn't noticed him. It was slow progress, but the other boy expected big results as he finally reached as far as he could climb and jumped off.
While in midair the boy quickly inflated into a huge round shape and started to roll. He smashed through tree branches like they were nothing, letting gravity turn his huge sphere shape into a natural cannonball. Kayaku realized that Chouichi had actually carefully aimed himself toward Jiraiya as he stood by the old tree where Shinobu dangled upside down from a rope.
It was a secret technique, a unique technique passed through generations of a clan.
Kayaku's eyes narrowed as he realized what it was. The memory of being alone while classmates were off learning from family members still burned. Even those who weren't part of a clan, still had at least one ninja family member who was willing to teach them some unique technique or skill they had picked up somewhere in their career.
He had no lack of friends and his friends' mothers would give him something to take home to eat and their fathers would tell him what a good kid he was, but none of them would ever teach him anything.
The teachers took pity on him, he begged them to teach something unique to him, but they always sidestepped the topic by saying it would be too difficult for him. Instead, they told him to practice his basics like throwing his kunai and shuriken and they even taught him advance chakra exercises like walking up a tree and concentrating his chakra into a leaf placed on his forehead. One exercise taught him to bring out the correct amount of chakra in the proper area and the other taught him to draw on his maximum power to a specific point. They told him he could theoretically master any techniques, therefore he practiced until he had mastered both exercises.
However, as he watched Chouichi, now a round sphere smashing down on their new teacher with an unbelievable huge force that sent dirt into the air, doing far more damage to Jiraiya than he had done. He felt as if he would have easily traded his skills for a secret technique.
Shinobu's scream drew his attention away from Jiraiya and Chouichi. The pair slamming into the tree had sent it slowly leaning more toward the river. Shinobu was swinging on the end of the rope, getting closer to crash into the ground or river.
Then he heard Jiraiya yell something and saw him throw a kunai. Kayaku watched in awe as the kunai caught the robe when it had swung the furthest away from the ground and closest to the river. The skill of the throw was incredible, to have hit at that moment and only hit the rope and not Shinobu herself. However, Jiraiya had clearly turned his attention back to Chouichi, but Kayaku watched when Shinobu hit the water.
Kayaku jogged over to the edge of the river, ignoring Jiraiya and Chouichi's fight. He looked around in concern, told himself nothing was wrong and Shinobu would call him idiot again as she pulled herself out of the water, but she didn't appear.
Shinobu's head finally broke over the water, but she released an awful shriek that sent shivers down his spine. It wasn't the desperate gasp of someone drowning. Something was horribly wrong.
Without hesitation, Kayaku dropped the bug-covered kunai to the ground and jumped into the water. He swam the rest of the way as fast as he could before he finally reached her. He moved an arm around her, but she flung her arms at him and kicked him in blind desperation. Her nails scratched his skin as she screeched into his ears.
"Ow, stop it. I'm trying to help!"
Kayaku swam, somehow pulling the panicking Shinobu with him.
When they got out of the river, Shinobu landed on her knees, covering her face with her hands. Kayaku looked at her bare arms, it occurred to him that he had never seen her outside of her oversized purple coat. He noticed curiously that several little dark spots covered her arms in random places.
"You can't swim or something?" he asked in a friendly tone, trying to get her to talk.
"Don't look at me," she whimpered.
"W-What?" He had trouble hearing her whisper past a growing buzzing sound.
"Don't look!" she screamed, but it was too late.
The dark spots on her arms seemed to multiply and move at first, but he looked closer and realized the original spots were holes and the movement was from a stream of little bugs crawling out in massive numbers, making her pale skin twist and distort from the movement underneath.
The bugs didn't move far, they merely swarmed around her, crawling around her wet skin and clothes, buzzing in irritation.
"Stop looking!" she screamed, locking tear filled eyes on him. The emotions of humiliation and panic were clear on her normally stoic face.
Secret Techniques again, but this time he didn't feel like he wanted them. The look in her eyes told him Shinobu didn't want them either.
Kayaku couldn't look away.
She locked an angry gaze on his expression of pity. He suddenly frowned as he noticed two spots form underneath her right eye, one underneath the other along her cheek. At first, he assumed they were tears, but they became dark like blood.
Shinobu whimpered in pain as she brought a hand quickly over her eye. She drew her hand away and looked at blood that covered her fingers. She returned her fingers to her cheek, Kayaku could see the spots really weren't spots as she gently fingered two new holes, carefully avoiding a new stream of bugs quickly exiting on her face, each covered in red.
"No," she whimpered. "Don't you have enough exits!"
They were trying to escape the water, desperately fighting their way out, he thought.
Kayaku watched the stream of bugs moving out from her cheek. He realized those holes must have been new compared to the others, and from her reaction, rather permanent. He felt pity for her and a feeling that bordered on disgust, bugs fascinated him, but that didn't mean he wanted them living inside him. However, he willed that feeling away, he didn't want to feel that way about his friend.
"S-Shinobu, it's okay," he tried. He didn't want her to feel embarrassed about his presence. He didn't want her to think that he felt disgusted about her.
"Shut up," she whispered harshly.
"No really!" He turned, ran over to the kunai he had dropped before plunging into the river, and picked it up. He tried to hand her the bug covered kunai in a gesture that showed he was neither afraid of what she was or disgusted. "I found this. This is yours right?"
The bugs on the kunai finally moved, flying off the kunai to join the rest of the swarm around her, they were now one more dark spot among a thousand others.
"I hate you…I hate you…"
"Shinobu, it's okay," he tried, thinking she was talking to the bugs.
"I hate you!" she yelled at him. He recoiled back in shock. Her eyes burned with anger, looking right at him. "You are always complaining about not belonging to a clan. Yet your totally ignorant of the freedom you have!"
"W-What?"
"If you're a member of a clan then you don't have any choice but to be part of its secrets! They don't allow it! It was done to them so they'll do it you, but you don't have anyone to force anything on you and yet all you do is complain!"
Rage and humiliation fuelled her words. She never wanted to be seen like this by anyone, much less by Kayaku. All she wanted to be was a normal girl, yet that dream was already broken when she was only a baby. She just wanted to keep her broken dream.
"I've had them inside of me before I can remember. I couldn't even give consent to his! All they do is make tunnels and exits that hurt! I hate them and I hate my father for doing this to me!" She reached up and touched her cheek again. Her voice was softer now, as her anger wilted away, "And now I'll have to wear that coat all the time, hide my face with the collar, just like father said. I defied him, rolled the collar down, thinking I do that forever, but he was right."
"Right about what?" said Kayaku, his tone defiant. "Being an orphan, I don't have any such experience of having a father being right." His tone changed to more inner-amusement at his own speech. He laughed, "I'm told parents know what is good for you, but without them I can only choose what is good for myself."
Kayaku sat right next to her, the same distance he had earlier in the day when Jiraiya introduced himself, he wasn't afraid of the nearby buzzing bugs. He pointed himself in a direction so he could watch Jiraiya and Chouichi, who were still fighting, and ignored any feeling of jealousy that the other boy had lasted so long.
"Earlier, you said you wanted to be the best ninja of the Aburame. Was that true?"
"I don't know," she whispered in a broken tone.
"I know what Chouichi said is true. He wants to show the true skills of the Akimichi. Do you know why?"
Her silence told him no.
"People view the Akimichi as fat and lazy and that their secret techniques are not as impressive as the rest of Konoha's clans. They are one of the noble clans, but people don't see them the same as the Hyuuga or Uchiha. Chouichi wants to show that an Akimichi using Akimichi secret techniques can still be a greater ninja that a Hyuuga or Uchiha. Because they have advance bloodlines it's likely he can't be greater than all of them, but he wants to show that even an Akimichi has a irreplaceable value within Konoha."
"What does an Akimichi have to do with me!" she snapped.
"Because Chouichi is being defiant toward others expectations," he yelled back. "You were being defiant as well weren't you? By not hiding your face underneath your coat's collar."
"But I didn't have holes in my face before! I knew when I did it would be over, that I would have to hide my face. These holes don't disappear, the bugs don't waste their energy by making holes and tunnels that could disappear after they use it, like the Aburame, they don't make unnecessary motions."
"An unnecessary motion?"
"The Aburame is also one of the noble clans of Konoha, but we hide who we are and are distant to everyone, even ourselves. Father says we hide for the element of surprise, to trap our enemy during a battle, but I know that's not completely true. Two years ago someone I thought was my friend was told by her parents what the Aburame are and she started calling me Bug Girl. My friend was disgusted by me, imagine if everyone in the class knew!"
Kayaku was silent for a moment, but when he spoke, his voice was more cool and confident than she ever remembered hearing it. "That person was a fool. We go to the Academy to become ninja. Every ninja needs a special advantage, relying on unique abilities and techniques. These are passed on to their family as secret techniques and advance bloodlines, insuring their family also has an advantage. Advantages are required to be successful and sometimes to survive." His last words were suddenly cold, "If you're ordinary, you die. I don't intend to be ordinary."
His last words chilled Shinobu to the core, she wondered where they had come from. She knew little about his orphan status or who his parents were, but she wondered if that anything to do with those words.
"Shinobu, you want to know my dream?" he asked with a cheerful fox-like smile, in contrast to the cold words he spoke a second ago. "My dream is to have a clan of my own. A name of my own, not just Kayaku, a clan name. Clans are filled with people who care about each other and not bad people who do things to each other that are wrong."
"You want to make your own clan. Idiot, an amazing person with amazing skills creates a clan. You aren't any of those!"
Damn, Jiraiya looked back toward Shinobu and Kayaku, her yelling at the blond boy was enough to distract him, but he was also worried. I made a mistake by cutting the rope. I didn't think how the bugs inside he would handle being insider her while being submerged in water.
Despite his guilt, he had a certain amount of pride in Kayaku. The boy hadn't even hesitated to save his teammate and had reacted faster than he could have. The blond boy's actions had raised Jiraiya's opinion back up once again.
Jiraiya had his own challenge, trying to find off Chouichi without hurting him or himself for that matter.
By using strength, momentum, and a combination of moves, Chouichi was slowly forcing him backwards toward the river. The boy remained in Multi-Size mode, longer than Jiraiya would have thought for a kid.
In truth, Jiraiya could have done one of a hundred different things to get out of this situation, but most likely injuring Chouichi as a result. Due to the boy's current size and strength, just threatening him with a kunai had little effect. For now the boy seemed intent in pushing him back toward the river and he was more than willing to test the boy's skills instead of his own.
Jiraiya could feel the river's edge on his sandaled feet. He had no doubt that the boy intended to push him into the water, perhaps making him fall, and give Chouichi a chance to get one of the bells.
"Alright, I've had enough of this," he said in an amusing tone. "Why don't you rest while I check on your teammates."
Chouichi didn't pay his words any attention as he moved forward, intending to push Jiraiya with the full force of his arms again.
Jiraiya jumped backward before Chouichi's open palms hit and landed in the middle of the river, except he didn't sink at all. Chouichi's eyes actually opened wide as he saw his teacher standing on the surface of the water.
"Ha Ha!" laughed Jiraiya. "You weren't expecting that were you."
Jiraiya started walking down the river toward the others as if it were mere casual walk. The other boy reverted to his normal size, too weak to do anything more, and slowly followed his teacher along the side of the river.
Shinobu and Kayaku's argument had quickly ended as they saw Jiraiya jump toward the river. They fully expected him to fall in, but when he didn't they looked in shock.
"That is so cool!" yelled Kayaku, his cold tone quickly vanished.
For once, Shinobu couldn't manage to call him an "idiot", mostly because she agreed.
They weren't hadn't moved much from where they collapsed after getting out of the river earlier, so Jiraiya merely walked on the river toward them and walked right off onto solid ground right next to them and knelt down next to Shinobu.
"Are you hurt?" he asked. His face looked stern, but his eyes showed his concern. Neither one showed the disgust or fear that Shinobu feared seeing. Her bugs were beginning to crawl back inside her, but she was painfully aware the few that dotted her pale skin.
"N-," she winced as she tried to speak, her hand flew up to caress the new holes on her cheek. The adrenaline from the situation was wearing off and she was more aware of the pain in her cheek. "No, I'm fine."
"Forgive me for sending you into the river," he smiled gently. He looked around, noticing the blood on Shinobu's cheek, Chouichi's growling stomach, and Kayaku's dirt covered clothes. "This has been a rough first test, but you've all made proud at your performance so far. I think I'm beginning to like you," he looked at Kayaku's wide smile and then remembered the pain behind him. "Except for you!"
"Ah!"
"In return, when this test is over I'll treat you to a meal, I'm sure you're all hungry by now."
Kayaku scratched his head with an uncertain expression. "The test isn't over yet?"
"Of course it's not! Idiot!" he yelled. "The test isn't over until you have bell or your tied to a log and whoever gets tied to the log stays there while the rest eat! You all have one more chance to win! Get ready to hide again—"
"Wait!" Kayaku scrambled back to his feet. "Sensei, before you start can you tell us how you walked on water!"
Jiraiya eyed him carefully. He's practically mastered tree climbing. It would be only natural that he would be curious about water walking.
"Water walking is a more advance chakra exercise than tree climbing. As brand new genin none of you should have the skill for it yet."
"But!"
Jiraiya sighed, but the boy was clearly listening to his every word. He turned and stepped back on to the river to give a demonstration.
"The release of chakra must match the weight of the body and the amount necessary to float. It is more difficult to control your chakra since water is not solid and constantly moving. This training is to teach an individual how to create a specific amount of chakra and expel it for a technique."
Kayaku watched him carefully before walking over to the river and focusing his chakra to his feet.
Jiraiya didn't say anything, but smile. With his skill, he'll be able to stand a second at most before falling right in. Oh well, he's already wet.
The boy's face twisted with concentration as he took a few experimental steps onto the river with a single foot. To everyone's surprise, he walked right into the middle and didn't fall.
To figure out water walking after just hearing how it works just one, maybe he is my genius!
He faced Shinobu and glared. "I'll prove I'm an amazing person with amazing abilities!" He turned his head toward Jiraiya. "I will get…" He stared wobbling. "a…" He started waving his arms in the air and his face twisted in panic. "bell!" Kayaku fell right into the water with a giant splash.
Then again, maybe not.
Next Chapter – The Most Important Thing
A/N: I hope during the Kayaku and Shinobu scene I didn't loose the emotion I was going for. I thought it was believable for a ten year old girl to be insecure about having bugs living inside her, those insecurities being hidden by the cool and collected nature of the Aburame. Shinobu is defiant to the Aburame way by not hiding her face by the collar, although until now she didn't have holes on her face. Next chapter will show what she decides to do in the future.
I've decided to go with a more realistic route with the holes. An Aburame is just a hive made of flesh, bone, and blood at the mercy of the bugs. I thought it was more traumatic for the character if the bugs are creating the holes and they are permanent. However, it made sense to me that the bugs could hide the holes, which would explain Shino. Perhaps like some bugs in real nature, they hide the exits to their home for security, but this requires control over the bugs that Shinobu doesn't have yet (but I will explore in the next chapter).
I hope Kayaku figuring out water walking wasn't too unbelievable. I figured Naruto learned it in day and he has bad chakra control and at the time, he had Orochimaru's Five Elements seal slowing him down. The Fourth was described as being brilliant with techniques and must have had good Chakra control to create the Rasengan. If it was, just remember, he fell in the water anyway.
Version 1.0
1.0: Original